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Lunch » Tags » Books » Reviews » The Ask: A Novel

The Ask: A Novel

1 rating: 1.0

A book

Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2010: How can a life so miserable be so funny? Is it because the stakes are so low (Milo Burke, the antihero of Sam Lipsyte's novel,The Ask, is a failure at many things, but most prominently at his job of pulling … see full wiki

Tags: Books, Cafe Libri

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

1 review about The Ask: A Novel

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Don't ask, don't tell

Aug 2, 2011

by TStocksl
posted in Cafe Libri: Reviewing Books & More

Exclusive to the Lunch Network

Rating:

The Ask--insider jargon for an endowment fund-raising request--is about college endowments like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is about tennis academies. The setting provides a backdrop, but the action, dialogue, and relationships revolve around the strange and strangely-visioned universe of the author's mind.

Milo Burke works, and not too well, for a Mediocre University's institutional development (more jargon, this time for professional begging and groveling to win the give) department. When he is laid off, his life spirals downward, until given a second chance for a special ask (from an old college roommate who hit it rich), at which point his life spirals downward faster.

There is an Everyman quality about Milo and the other characters in his life and in Lipsyte's universe, but neither he nor anyone else in the novel is heroic or even more than moderately likable. Perhaps that is Lipsyte's point, and perhaps its because Milo, the narrator, is a fount of bitterness, neurosis, geekness, anger, and that twitchy urban fear of life that makes every city sidewalk an incipient jungle.

So that's the Ask: there are a few moments of real humor and deeper self-recognition, and it bubbles along at a quick clip, but it really isn't a life-changer.

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